Hello and welcome to your weekend haunt
with Spook Lit, an audiobook club by dreary dendrophile
I’m your host Lyns, and I’ll be reading aloud our spooky stories. Thank you so much for being here. I really hope you enjoy.
First of all - wtf? We’re doing something a little different this week. Our next chapter led me down a serious rabbit hole of research, and I can’t wait to share it with you. I was stressing about getting it all done when a friend suggested this Q&A / AMA episode as a fun alternative. My initial reaction was huh? Q&A? Who do I think I am? Do I really think people give a shit about asking me questions and hearing my thoughts and feelings? Let’s not get a big head…
But I guess my rampant imposter syndrome is weaker than my love of talking about myself, so here we are. Thank you so much to everyone who sent me questions. If any others come up, feel free to hit me up in the comments.
Ask Me Anything:
Is it disrespectful to collect or preserve the remains of an animal?
(Question from a listener: “The whole skull preservation is also intriguing. I may not be able to retrieve it — and I know bird skulls are very delicate and fragile — but there is a crow body that has been decomposing for the last few months along one of the roads I walk every day. I could not bring myself to handle it when it was more... ‘fresh,’ but I’ve been thinking maybe once Nature has taken care of things a bit, I might see if there’s anything left worth salvaging. Though... I’m not sure. It feels disrespectful of a wild creature to want to ‘own’ a piece of its body.”)
**Disclaimer: Please check your local laws before obtaining any wild animal skulls, bones, or taxidermy.
First of all, it says a lot about your character that you’re even considering this so thoughtfully. Most people would think nothing of it - they’d either be totally down or totally disgusted. I too have mixed feelings about skulls, yet my day job as an animal mortician does include skull recovery and preservation, mostly of cats and dogs. And I love my work immensely.
Is keeping a crow skull more disrespectful than leaving it on the side of the road? Regarding “owning” a piece of the crow, would you feel weird about the crow owning your bones or ashes? Would you feel disrespectful holding onto your pet’s skull or ashes?
I think the only way to answer this question is to better understand your own intentions. For me, it is always about having respect for the creature. A skull is a beautiful reminder of death—in some ways, it’s giving them another life. You’re keeping a piece of them, just like ashes or feathers, and paying homage to nature and to them as a sacred being. It can feel ceremonial. Bird skulls in particular can be symbolic of messengers flitting between the worlds, delivering spiritual guidance between the living and the dead.
I saw a really beautiful quote from Jade Adgate a few days ago that made me think of your question:
“For the Deathwalker archetype, life is a sacred endeavor, and altars are everywhere. To build an altar to death is to remind yourself to show up to this calling and dedicate a portion of your devotion to cultivating your own relationship with Death.”
If you decide you want to keep a skull or bones, the means of acquisition matters. Please don’t go on Amazon and buy a cat skull for $15 (yes, this is a thing) because Memento Mori. In my work, I often spend months on each individual skull, and I know just by looking at each one who the animal is and pieces of their story. I keep ID coins with each skull as part of protocol, but I don’t need them. I know each skull by name.
One night when I first started doing skull preservation, somebody brought me two dead pigeons and asked me to try macerating their skulls as a trial run for birds - something we don’t currently offer. I was in a massive hurry. I didn’t know how to remove the skull from the head of a bird, and I didn’t have time to research it.
Instead, I ended up prepping the pigeon heads by just cutting them off without ritual. It hit me deeply and immediately felt like the most terrible thing I’d ever done. I sobbed afterwards, and I still feel absolutely wretched when I think about it. I would never treat a beloved pet that way, and I will never do that again to any creature, no matter where it came from.
And there are ways to be more respectful. You can say thank you. You can honor the rest of the body by burying it or turning it in to your local pet funeral home. My company aquamates strays and roadkill when they are given to us, out of respect. Acknowledging the animal as a being is what separates reverence from a mere trophy.
Skulls are incredibly beautiful, and they deepen our relationship to nature, animals, and death. They are a visual reminder that life is precious and fleeting. Skulls aren’t for everyone, but if you decide to obtain one, I hope they add a sense of wonder to your life and your surroundings.
What’s your most strange paranormal encounter?
Sometime around 2018, I was at a live music show at J&M Cafe in Pioneer Square. Before closing in 2019, the J&M was competing with Central Saloon and Merchant’s Cafe for the title of oldest bar in Seattle.
After the show, I was sitting at the bar pounding rum and diets with my former husband and current bff Dave. There was no one else around us except the bartender on the other side of the bar. There was a giant mirror behind the bar, reflecting us and anyone who would have walked behind our barstools.
When we sat down, we noticed a perfectly good cigarette sitting at the end of the bar, to my left. We thought maybe it was saving someone’s place. We debated stealing it, but I was partial to menthols at the time. (I know, so trashy! I quit smoking four years ago.)
After chatting a few minutes, we noticed the cigarette had moved from the bar to the floor. Had we just not noticed it before? No - it was gone from the bar. Nobody had come or gone. And the bar top had a small upturned lip that would have prevented it from rolling off anyway. Even if it had, it started to my left and now landed on my right, closer to Dave’s barstool.
We assumed we just missed someone walking by. We picked it up and placed it back in its original spot, vowing to keep a closer eye on it.
A few more minutes went by. More rum and diets—just a typical Tuesday for me back then. I was a professional drinker, and I recall every detail of this encounter, so I certainly wasn’t sloshed.
We were bantering about the band, debating whether to order food, when we looked down and saw the cigarette back on the floor. Just sitting there between our stools, minding its own business, looking up at us as if it had been there the whole time. We were shocked. We definitely weren’t ghost hunters back then, so instead of embracing the experience, we hollered for our tab and got the hell out of dodge.
That was one of my very first paranormal encounters, and looking back it makes me so happy to think that some frisky old bar regular decided to mess with us that night.
Are you still giving tarot readings? How can I learn to read the cards?
Yes! Tarot readings are currently available in my Etsy shop, and paid subscribers are eligible for a free reading every year.
To learn tarot, I took an 8-week course with my amazing teacher Ken Boggle from Living for the Dead. You can sign up for classes on his website: kenboggle.com.
I also recommend listening to an episode of Ghosted! By Roz Hernandez where she interviews Rachel True from The Craft. They talk about getting to know the cards and deciding to read for yourself as a method of self-soothing. I really love this episode, as well as Rachel True’s book and tarot deck, True Heart Intuitive Tarot.
What first drew you to ghosts, and has that draw changed over time?
I used to be afraid of ghosts until I moved to Pike Place Market in 2015. That first summer living in the market, I visited Ghost Alley Espresso and heard about all the local stories. I bought a book written by the owner at the time, Mercedes Yaeger, titled Market Ghost Stories. On the cover is a map with a starred location - presumably pointing out where the ghosts live - and that star pretty much marked the spot where I lived at the time.
It’s impossible to avoid ghost stories when you live in the market, and I jumped right in with eagerness. I was still afraid, but I immediately started learning as much as I could. I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. I attended the market ghost tour run by Mercedes Yaeger several times, including on Halloween night, when they took us up to an abandoned section of Kell’s Irish Pub - the old funeral service area of the Butterworth Mortuary.
I roamed the streets every morning on our dog walks, searching for Princess Angeline (Chief Seattle’s daughter). I spoke to bar regulars who had lived and worked in the market their whole lives, drinking up their ghost stories just as enthusiastically as the gin and tonics I inhaled at the time. We held an Ouija session at The Tasting Room on Post Alley, which used to be a sort of horse stable parking lot located next to the mortuary. It was a creepy little place at night, and I always stayed late to help close up the winery so whoever was working wouldn’t have to be alone with the rats and ghosts. They paid me in wine.
Things really shifted in the spring and summer of 2019 with the Alaskan Way Viaduct coming down. So many paranormal things happened during that time, and for me, what started as harmless intrigue turned frightening and fatal. An active spirit at one of the produce stands got violent on the anniversary of his death. He changed the radio station and knocked kitchen utensils off the wall. Someone said “oh, that’s just the ghost,” and then a knife flew across the room. I heard about this story when literally all of the employees came sprinting into the bar, having closed the shop early. They were all terrified, and my buddy ran so fast he forgot his cigarettes.
Another friend was scared out of her espresso shop when the drying racks kept falling on their own while she was working. The activity kept escalating, and they performed two spiritual cleansings as a result.
Even worse, we had a series of suicides within a few weeks of each other, all in this same location. I came upon one of them on my walk home from the gym one morning. Things had gone from a fun curiosity to a serious heaviness that was affecting us all. So many of us were on edge during the deconstruction of the viaduct, and I stopped searching for spirits for a long time.
Mercedes forewarns about possible troubles with the viaduct in her book, written a decade prior:
“From a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article about the Duwamish grave-sites along the waterfront: ‘They were the ancient original inhabitants of what is now Seattle, and there is speculation that their remains are beneath the Jell-O-like soils that lie on top of Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle. This is the newest consideration to our ongoing “What to Do With the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Waterfront and Sea Wall” saga. Our history of disrupting sacred burial sites is well known.’” - Mercedes Yaeger, Market Ghost Stories
She also quotes a Washington Post article:
“In the religion of the tribe and those of many other Native Americans, disturbance of ancestral graves is a fearsome thing. It is believed that when ancestors’ spirits are disturbed and made restless, it may have serious consequences among the living, causing accidents, illness and death.” - Mercedes Yaeger, Market Ghost Stories, quoted from: Harden, Blaine, “Washington State Bridge Project Yields Long-Forgotten Graves,” The Washington Post, December 19, 2004.
I didn’t think much about ghosts again until I got sober in 2021. During those first few excruciating months, I would get off work and do literally anything not to drink - cross stitch, color, play games on my phone, anything to keep my hands busy. I started watching the show Kindred Spirits with Amy Bruni and Adam Berry as a distraction. They made me curious and fascinated again, and I couldn’t get enough.
Towards the end of 2022, I started experiencing some intense hauntings no matter where I went—it felt like an attachment. I was incredibly scared. I’ve written about this period several times, but it turned out to be what I believe might be a fragmented haunting of myself. It was baffling and tricky to diagnose, and I still get haunted in this way sometimes. I do believe you can be haunted by yourself, as scary as that sounds.
Throughout 2023, I continued to explore the supernatural and started learning more about ghost hunting and spirit communication, as well as taking classes on psychic development. Since then, I have only continued to learn and grow. My relationship with ghosts has become a lot more comfortable, but no less important.
I’ve heard it’s common to become more interested in ghosts and spirits after someone close to you dies, or after a near-death experience. I didn’t have anything like that, but I was suicidal in 2021 before getting sober, and I had occasional severe depressive episodes throughout 2022 and 2023. I think for me, it was my own close brush with death that made me more receptive. And developing relationships and connections with spirits has only helped me heal since then.
Thank you all again for sending me your questions! I'd love to continue the conversation in the comments. You guys are the greatest.
What’s Lurking on Spook Lit:
Next time, I promise we will get into the chapter called “The Striding Place,” and I have a whole spiel about faceless entities. I’ve been researching them to death (bad pun intended). I cannot wait to get into it with you.
Until then, thank you for listening to Spook Lit. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe. I appreciate you all so much.
Thank you and hauntingly yours, dreary dendrophile
Credits:
* Music: “Horror Spooky Piano” by Nikita Kondrashev on Pixabay
* Artwork: Jeff Bent on sporecloud.com
* Photography: Lyns McCracken
* Linktree: https://linktr.ee/drearydendrophile
All Spook Lit Audiobooks are public domain.
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